The Register is running ashort tutorial on
everyone's favorite obsession: getting fonts to look their best.
Included are instructions for re-compiling the FreeType engine
to get an optimal look, something distributions often fail to do due to
potential licensing problems.
Another interesting thing I learned from the article: although MS has
removed the web fonts from their servers, apparently the original
license permitted unlimited non-commercial redistribution in unaltered
form, and hence a SourceForgeproject has sprung up
which provides the fonts and instructions for installing them. All-in-all,
a worthwhile read for font aficionados.

Comments

Ah.. what's so special about the last four screenshots? Is this about disabling AA for small fonts? Other than that, I can't think of anything special with those screenshots. I think the fonts are ugly.

But I think this sharp but crappy look makes me happy. *Me* critizises the "colored" look of AA-fonts: Letters of a e.g. black text have no homogen tone but one letter looks more gray another one looks more black. But its getting better and better...

Just a glace at his two Openoffice screenshots showed me this guy is seriously whacked. The second screenshot, which he claimed is "more refined" is clearly much more jagged than the first. A simple look with Xmag sees the only difference between the two is that the second has anti-aliasing turned off. Same with the"results" screenshots at the end.... they look like crap compared to my fonts in KDE, and I didn nothing speccial. Just apt-get install msttcorefonts in Debian. There is no anti-aliasing going on at all in these screenshots, they look horrible.... What is the point of this article exactly?

Seems like the guy had AA enabled from the beginning, and thought that he didn't because he's one of those who don't like AA fonts. Then he fscked around with freetype, and managed to cripple it enough to make it stop working completely. When he saw the result he thought "wow, nice AA fonts!!!" ;)

No if u look it the title bar fonts and menus that he is talking about. Yes he has turned aa of. But thanks to him my open office looks as good as star office. And I didn't know that star office and open office don't use the system fonts.

Ok, i know this has been said but this guy is not very bright. The first OO.org screen shot had aa turned on and the rest that were supposed to be better looked like crap without aa turned on. Seriously, how can you think it looks better? I would at least like to see someone do an article to make it look better. i know sometimes i've had problems with oo.org fonts looking bad but i know kde looks good for me.

This article isn't that good. There are much better information aviliable on the web (such as the Font Deunglification HOWTO) -- I can't understand how this got on KDE Dot News as well as SashDot. It's that bad, not to menton higly biased toward KDE. It would be nice if it included information on making it work with non-KDE programs aswell (especially since many people use GNOME/GTK-based programs and non-KDE browsers like Mozilla).

This is just your typial PC World-style article that just goes on and on about things the writer dosn't even know much about in the first place.

> It would be nice if it included information on making it work with non-KDE programs aswell
> (especially since many people use GNOME/GTK-based programs and non-KDE browsers like
> Mozilla).

Even Mozilla's default is anything else than GTK. You need to compile support for GTK in but you stil deal with the XUL Widgetset. With GNOME browser you hopefully don't want to say GALEON now since GALEON is anything else than a full countable Webbrowser.

I doubt that English was the their first language. You were essentially taking a blow the belt shot at them as well. The "krammer" part didn't help your cause much either.

Note: I don't agree with original poster's shot at Galeon. Galeon is a complete _web browser_. More complete than perhaps anything else in Linux, mostly because it's a web browser only. Phoenix is also a webbrowser only, but is not as featurefilled as Galeon is (yet).

It's true that Galeon doesn't have it's own rendering engine, but Konqueror (technically) doesn't either. So using original poster's definition of webbrowser, Konqueror is much less of a complete webbrowser than Mozilla (which is tied to Gecko), is. Konqueror is not tied to either gecko or khtml, and is not essentially even a webbrowser, but accepts the paradigm of being one.

1. Antialiasing is great, but disable it for point sizes between, say, 8 and 14
2. But now we have a problem. The fonts between 8 and 14 points (which have no antialiasing now) look ugly. This is because the bytecode interpreter is not turned on by default. The bytecode interpreter greatly enhances the look of fonts when they 1) are not antialiased and 2) when they actually contain any bytecode to be interpreted!
3. Solution to 2): turn on the bytecode interpreter.

Some fonts contain bytecode (like arial, verdana, tahoma etc.) but some do not (for example, Luxi). So it will work only for a subset of the TrueType fonts you have installed.
When you use antialiasing for all point sizes, there is no point in using the freetype2 bytecode interpreter and you can leave your freetype2 as it is.

A point which I don't understand is that he tells his readers to turn on "Use sub-pixel hinting". Does someone know what this means? If it means the same as subpixel antialiasing, then only use this for LCD screens!

Last words: if you want good font quality, use RedHat 8.0! See also the attachment.

I disagree. All my fonts are 10pt and they look much beter using AA than without, IMO. And these are the MSTT fonts as well.

Personally, I think all these people who think AA fonts look bad at thes emoderate range sizes (10,12pt) need to get a better monitor with a lower dot pitch or something. They look absolutely great from where I sit.

I'm not taking sides on this (if it's a worthwhile invention, people will use it, otherwise they won't), but -- that's precisely the point, to come up with terminology for a KDE/Linux system. What is erroneous is when people refer to KDE as Linux software.

The closest analogy I can think of is LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). Except maybe for Apache, all of those could be replaced with something else to get the same function.

It might be that there are anonymous voices accusing you for moaning around... but at least I am not anonymous and I must admit that sometimes I can not help but feel kind of frustrated reading your comments:

To me you sometimes (not allways!) seem to be more interested in sounding cool than in writing something constructive.

NOTE: Nobody here is interested in knowing about you loving or not liking Andreas and it would be nice to concentrate on arguments instead of making silly comments about him.

I agree, two posts (at least...) were deleted, that is to say censored.
Yes, it seems that this site helps some KDE league propaganda for imposing this KGX acronym, where the K of KDE is associated with a G and a X, and it is not neutral...
It is sad...
Thank you Neil for your voyance and for going in an other direction.

I wish I could meet with a few of the anti-KGX people, or at least talk on the phone with them. I don't think I'll ever understand the reasons you dislike the term so much. I think it's handy - it refers to KDE plus GNU/Linux, a completely Free software desktop (often also free), as opposed to KDE in general, which can be used on everything from OSX to AIX... pretty much anything with X. ;)

Seriously - KDE is a Desktop Envionment that runs on a variety of platforms, some of which are quite expensive and proprietary. KGX refers to a Free and or Open Source software system. I'd say BSD variants (other than BSDi) also count, although the more common configuration lining up on corporate desktops appears to be Linux.

KDE as an Environment (i.e., kio_slaves, KParts, DCOP, etc) can (although there are currently few examples) run on headless embedded systems or palmtops (not quite a desktop). I already have Apache make DCOP calls (via dcop through PHP) to arrange Noatun playlists on my server which has nothing plugged into its video card.

So KDE as an development environment, or KDE as a desktop on proprietary systems (like OSX) is quite different than KDE+GNU/Linux, which is what many people immediately think of when they think KDE. KGX is a good term to make people realize that KDE is a *bigger* thing than just a "Linux desktop".

So I'm not sure why some people seem to think the term KGX diminishes KDE...

I don't get it. The KGX phrase is only published here and on a draft page of kdeleague.org explicitely not for circulation. It doesn't make sense to push a phrase or brand when you've got nothing to show for it. Search on Google for KGX, you'll find some of the discussions here, the draft, and nothing more. So I doubt this is an attempt to push KDE League propaganda.

Thus I still don't know why the term is used. In fact, it alienates the Dot from KDE. KDE (as a project, KDE Inc, the developers) would never show a specific preference for GNU/Linux. Making it seem like KDE is primarily designed for Linux is an insult to our non-Linux developers and users.

I don't expect this is intentional propaganda from Andreas, because it wouldn't make sense if it were. I guess he just likes the concept personally and doesn't realize how silly it is to mention KGX as long as it is an empty concept.

> It doesn't make sense to push a phrase or
> brand when you've got nothing to show for it.

Rob, I'm not pushing it, I'm simply using it. When it's been circulating
for a while we can get a better idea how people feel about it. The jury is
still out. Sorry I can't launch a million dollar advertising campain
with it ;-).

> In fact, it alienates the Dot from KDE. KDE (as a project, KDE Inc, the
> developers) would never show a specific preference for GNU/Linux.

The article was entitled "Fabulous fonts in *Linux*". What alienates people
is this type of negativity. If you have better ideas, work with them,
but please stop knocking down others who are trying to improve things.
Sure it's easy to attack people who are trying something new, but is it
helpful?

> I don't expect this is intentional propaganda from Andreas . . .
> doesn't realize how silly it is to mention KGX as long as it is an
> empty concept.

Propaganda: how can use of KGX be propaganda? Geez.

"Empty concept"? It's not empty, you know exactly what it means.
Or is "monopd", etc. an "empty concept" too?

People who use monopd call it monopd. Nobody except you actually uses the phrase KGX so as long as long as your KGX writeup is still an unpublished draft I see no point in mentioning it here.

Read my previous reply again, and note I *don't* accuse you of pushing something or making propaganda. Finish the draft and publish it and at least the term is properly introduced and can be linked and so on. The other comments show that apart from some KDE insiders nobody knows what KGX is.

Maybe even more important: the register indeed calls the article "Fabulous Fonts in Linux". Renaming that to KGX in the Dot header is bad, especially as the article talks mostly about OpenOffice and FreeType and only mentions KDE by the coincidence the author is familiar with it, by no means is it a specific KDE guide.

I probably would've objected against posting in the first place, as the article isn't all that special, especially not for KDE. But it was posted rather soon after the submission - as if nice fonts are groundbreaking news that can't wait a day.

PS: I *am* working with better ideas, on http://kdenews.unixcode.org/
PPS: Don't mistake critism on an idea or situation as a personal attack.

While this article isn't the best, it isn't the worst either. It's not like a whole lot of harm has been done by publishing an article on fonts.

I'm *totally* opposed to introducing these additional delays in approving dot articles. We need *more* articles, not less. If you want to help, submit more articles or improve submitted ones in favour of slowing things down with bureaucracy.